The Barkeep (29 page)

“You got me wrong here, I’m telling you.”

“So tell me.”

“It’s these ladies,” said Nicosia, leaning forward, like he was passing a secret just between the two of them. “They’re old as dust, they forget. It’s dangerous for them to have too much all at once. They’d take a couple, forget they took them, and take some more. Next thing you’d know, the bottle is empty, they’re dead on the floor, and I’m shit out of luck. So I keep the bottles in the truck and dole out just enough to fill their little weekly pillboxes, you know, seven daily doses at a time. It keeps them healthy and alive.”

“Mildred Payne,” said Scott.

“Go ahead, call them all,” said Nicosia, “and they’ll tell you they like what I provide. That they’ve come to depend on me. You want the numbers? Call whoever the hell you want.”

“Janet Moss.”

“You hear what I’m saying? Call her.”

“We already did,” said Scott.

“Good, then you know. She told you, didn’t she?”

Scott didn’t answer, he simply looked down at his file as if the secrets of the universe were written there.

“What did she tell you?” said Nicosia.

“She told us that you did what you did without her knowledge.”

“That’s a lie. She gave me the prescription, gave me the money, even paid me for the time. You can find the damn checks if you want. And I told her I wasn’t going to give it all to her at once. That woman is so whacked, I give it to her all at once you’d be spending the next week fumigating the house. She’s crazy enough to want to die.”

“She wasn’t talking about the drugs, Eddie.”

“Then what the hell was she…”

Eddie Nicosia stopped midsentence and stared at Scott for a moment before his face creased with an emotion close to fear and Mia felt a shiver of anticipation. Even after all these years, whether in the interrogation room or in the courtroom, these moments where the truth of things were slowly revealed never got old. And she sensed that here, now, the doubts that had been plaguing her since the Chase case concluded would somehow be confirmed or dismissed, and either result would ease her burden.

“What did she say about me?” said Nicosia to Scott.

“You know what she said.”

“Oh crap.”

“That’s right.”

“But she got it wrong. I swear she got it wrong.”

“Then let’s go over it. How long have you known her?”

“Five, six years.”

“How’d you meet?”

“I was doing gutters down the street. I had some time, so I was knocking on doors, looking for another job. She answered, gave me the eye, you know.”

“And you knew she was having trouble with her husband after he moved out.”

“More than trouble. She told me everything, yeah. That’s the way it always is. I’m like their confessor. I hear about their marriages, their bunions. It’s harder work than you could imagine. You ever seen a bunion?”

“And you knew she was struggling to keep the house,” said Scott, “and that her financial problems would become more severe if he divorced her. But you also knew there would be an insurance windfall if he died.”

“She told me that, yeah. We talked about the options, yeah. I didn’t know the amount of the insurance, just that there was some. So all of that’s right. I won’t deny any of that. I’m trying to be honest here.”

“Try harder. You were servicing her at the time—that’s the way you put it, right? And she was paying, right?”

“Getting her money’s worth, too.”

“And you were afraid the money train would stop.”

“It looked likely.”

“And so you ran him over with your van.”

“No, I didn’t. I swear.”

“But that’s what she said you said.”

“It’s not true.”

“You didn’t say that to her? Is she lying? Should we haul her in?”

“I think I need a lawyer. I thought this was just about my broken taillight. You said I could have a lawyer, right? That thing I signed. Well, hell, before I say anything else, I want a lawyer.”

“Do you have a lawyer already?”

“Not one I don’t owe money to. But you said you’d get me one, right?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Okay then. That’s what I want.”

The detective calmly put down his pen, leaned back, put his hands behind his head like he was enjoying a day at the shore.

“If that’s what you want, Eddie,” said Scott, “if that’s what you really want, then we’ll stop the conversation right here right now. We’ll have to lock you up for a bit, until your lawyer shows, but that will only be a couple of days. When we end up back here, you’ll just have to answer the same questions. And if you don’t talk based on your lawyer’s advice, we’ll just have
to assume that everything Mrs. Moss told us represents the truth. Which means we’ll have no choice but to charge you with murder. With the drugs we found, and all those Social Security checks you cashed, the bail on a murder charge will be pretty high. A million maybe. And unless you can come up with a cool hundred thou, you’ll stay in jail until the trial. We’re a bit backlogged now, so figure a year, maybe more.”

“Fuck you. I can’t be here for no year.”

“And after the year’s up and we have the trial, we’ll see what a jury thinks of the whole mess, with all these women paying you all kinds of money to run their errands and service them in all your clever ways. But if that’s the way you want to play it, if you really want a lawyer, Eddie, that is your constitutional right, and we would never, ever want to impinge on your constitutional rights.”

“It sounds like you’re doing a pretty damn good job of pinge-ing anyway.”

“So, should I get you that lawyer?”

Nicosia sucked his teeth and rubbed his jaw and did a decent imitation of a man trying to decide whether to bluff with his pair of twos or to chuck the damn thing in.

“I told her what she said I told her, yeah,” said Eddie finally, rubbing a finger along the hard edge of the metal table.

“Was it the truth?”

“No.”

“Then why did you say it?”

“Look, I’ll be honest.”

“In these moments, that’s always a good idea.”

“I got these women, the ones with their names on the pill bottles, taking care of me. It’s a sweet play, really. And we both get from it, you know? These women, sometimes I’m the only loving they got in their lives.”

“That’s pretty sad.”

“Innit? But there it is. They need me. And, with the state of my business and my debts, I need them too. It’s a mutual thing, you see. Symbolic, you understand. So I been hearing all this crap from Janet about her husband the creep and all, and then, bam, he gets run over. Hit-and-run. No suspects. And I see a way to make the thing we have, with the financial benefits, a bit more solid. A way to become like a hero in her life, and no one’s the wiser. So I tell her I done it.”

“What you’re telling me is, it wasn’t murder, it was fraud.”

“Pshaw. A little white lie ain’t fraud.”

“Lying about a murder isn’t a little white lie.”

“Now you’re getting all technical on me. Maybe it had a pinkish hue.”

“What about the time before?”

“What time before?”

“When that Chase lady was killed.”

“What, the one that got aced in her home?”

“That’s the one. Did you just tell Mrs. Moss you did that, too?”

“I didn’t tell her nothing about that. Why? What did she say?”

“Mrs. Moss knew there was something going on between her husband and the Chase woman before the murder, right?”

“She might have mentioned to me there was something between her husband and some woman at some point.”

“And she was upset about what was going on between them, right?”

“I assume she was. Who wouldn’t be?”

“And then the Chase woman was killed.”

“Look, the husband was still living there then. Maybe I might have wet the wick once or twice there while he was out, she sure wasn’t getting it from him, but I don’t ever get too
involved if the husband’s still there. Too many guns in the world, you know what I’m saying.”

“You didn’t know that the husband and the Chase woman were together.”

“I would have been more shocked than anyone.”

“Why’s that?”

“Look, I never said nothing about that one. Nothing. In fact, Janet never told me who the woman was until after she was killed. We wasn’t that close yet, not until her husband moved out. And anyway, it was that Chase guy that did that, wasn’t it? You convicted him, right? How the hell would I take credit for that? And I sure didn’t do it…But wait. Wait.”

“What, Eddie.”

“The son of the Chase woman was just at the house and he was asking questions and…Oh, now I see.”

“What do you see?”

“That little fucker is trying to pin his father’s crime on me. That little fucker wants to make me the fall guy. And you’re the sap that’s letting him.”

“We’re just trying to find the truth here.”

“Now it all makes sense. I was wondering how that taillight got broked. That little fucker.”

“You got anyone working for you, Eddie?”

“What, in the business? Nah, the way I work it, I need to work alone.”

“No assistant? No mentally challenged helper to keep you on schedule?”

“I’d have to pay him, right?”

“I suppose.”

“Well, there you go.”

“What about a guy named Flynn? Timmy Flynn? You ever run into him?”

“Who is he? A cop?”

“No.”

“A name like that, he should be a cop.”

“Take a minute, Eddie,” said Scott, standing up. “I’ll be right back. Don’t go anywhere.”

“You mean that door, it ain’t locked?”

“No,” said Scott. “It’s locked.”

Mia watched as Scott left the room. A moment later he was by her side. “What do you think?” he said.

She stood there a moment and looked at Nicosia. He was about as vile a specimen as she had seen in a long while. They had a raft of stuff they could get him on: fraud, embezzlement, drug counts, maybe even prostitution. Not to mention that broken taillight. And she was inclined to nail him on all of them. But that would be about it.

“It’s not there,” she said. “Book him on what we have and keep him overnight, but it’s just not there.”

44.

LATTE

A
nnie Overmeyer had a suspicion that needed to be scratched. And she might not have been willing to admit it to herself, but she had something else that need scratching too. Deep in the still-tender recesses of her largely galvanized heart lay the hope that this visit just might relieve both itches.

The suspicion part was rooted in the letters that Austin Moss had written to Justin’s mother and the way Janet Moss had described her relationship with her husband. Annie had been the other woman enough to know there was something in both that didn’t feel right.

Annie became involved with married men for all the right reasons. They were safe. They were attentive. They bought her Mai Tais, one after the other. They were fun in a what-the-hell-let’s-debase-myself-a-little-more sort of way. And they somehow filled the emotional needs she chose not to deal with in other, less productive ways, like sitting in some badly decorated office and blathering on about her father’s cold demeanor and all the affection he didn’t shower on his little girl. Sure, the sex wasn’t always that terrific, but these married men sure did appreciate the hell out of her body. And that right there was the key.

The notes she received from her married lovers, breathless letters from the romantics or shorthand text messages thumbed into a BlackBerry from the terminally busy, might have started out with paeans to emotion—
oh my heart, oh my soul, oh my love
—but always ended with not-so-oblique references to the carnal—
your lips, your breasts, your
… Yeah, yeah, yeah. They wanted to screw her, she got that. It was always there, behind every drink, every dinner, every line. Whatever they were trading, sex was the currency. And it was precisely that, the sex, that was missing from Austin Moss’s letters. And it didn’t matter that Eleanor Moss might not have had the body of a twentysomething anymore; sex was sex, and if it was burning somewhere, it would have come out on the page.

Buttressing Annie’s suspicions about the letters had been Janet Moss’s description of her marriage.
We felt like we had been pulled out of something and saved
, she had said of her relationship with her husband.
It wasn’t perfect, our marriage, it wasn’t a model, I admit that. But it was ours. And it was all I had.
There was much in all of this that tolled familiar to Annie. She had thought she would feel a kinship to Janet Moss in Moss’s role of the long-suffering wife. The cheated-with and the cheated-on are both inextricably linked; one can’t exist without the other, and both, in their way, are willing participants in the epic drama of infidelity. But there was a whiff here of something else that Annie could relate to even more strongly: marriage as a saving grace, a blissful fading into a secure and contented future.

Annie had felt the urge herself, to give up the life she was living and give herself over to something, anything. She had been proposed to a number of times by these married men, and she had considered it, more seriously than she would like to acknowledge, not because of love, because she hadn’t been in
love, or because the sex was so brilliant, because it was usually as pedestrian as an old lady shambling down the street with tennis balls stuck onto the feet of her walker. No, she had considered it because she was tired, exhausted actually, lonelier than she would ever admit, and wanted it to end. All of this, to end.

Someone once said that marriage was the death of hope, and he was half-right. The true seductiveness of marriage, to Annie, was not a matter of settling but of suicide. The dream was to see all the impossible hopes, all those futile expectations, bleed through sliced blue arteries into a bathtub, before something new and shiny arose from the red-stained water: a lovely little corpse pushing baby carriages, attending PTA meetings, steaming vegetables, flirting with handymen. To even imagine the peace of it now was to swoon in anticipation.

Janet Moss, she sensed, had made that exact deathly leap with Austin Moss. And though her marriage wasn’t perfect, containing, as Annie imagined, neither love nor, more significantly, sex, it was all she had. Until it was under threat by Eleanor Chase. But what was Eleanor Chase offering if not sex? That was the question Annie was coming back to the Moss house on Mantis Drive to discover.